A Strategy that Survives Contact with Reality Starts by Protecting Your Ability to Act
Most strategies fail because people are boxed in, not because they’re unmotivated
We spend too much time assuming strategy fails because of poor thinking, faulty plans, or lack of buy-in. But more often, strategy fails in execution because, when it meets the real world, the organisation is unable to act.
Not unwilling. Unable.
Not because of resistance, laziness, or incompetence, but because the structures that once enabled action have eroded by bureaucracy, or been replaced by performance theatre and a lack of freedom to make decisions. The people closest to the work, those most aware of what's changing, are too often the least empowered to respond. Execution dies not from lack of effort, but from the slow erosion of agency.
So if you want a strategy that survives contact with reality, start by protecting your organisation's ability to act.
Strategy dies when people can't act
In "How Strategy Execution Really Fails," I argued that strategy breaks down through delay, distraction, and the slow drift toward activities that appear strategic but achieve little. In "The Plan is Nothing, Planning is Everything", I explored how orientation, not the plan itself, is what really matters.
But orientation without the capacity to act is just awareness. It's a strategy of observation only.
The missing link is agency. Strategy lives or dies in the organisation's ability to move. Not just from the top, but throughout the organisation. To shift direction, to adapt, to seize an opportunity before it disappears, to respond to a threat before it becomes a critical issue.
Too many organisations assume that if people know the direction and want to contribute, action will follow. But desire alone doesn't deliver. Execution requires a viable structure. It requires people to have the authority, clarity, resources, and relationships to actually do something useful. That must be possible without waiting for permission, navigating internal bureaucracy, or second-guessing strategic intent.
Agency is structural, not motivational
We like to think of agency as a mindset. "Be more empowered." "Take ownership." But if the structure of the organisation doesn't support that mindset, it becomes a hollow call. Worse, it becomes a blame mechanism. We ask people to be empowered, then give them no viable way to act.
The Viable System Model offers a useful lens here. It is not just a diagnostic tool. It's a way of thinking about what makes action possible. A viable organisation isn't just one that is efficient or aligned; it is also one that is effective. It is one where each operational unit has the autonomy to respond to its environment, with coherence held by structures that coordinate, support, and enable adaptation.
Agency is not a leadership virtue. It is an organisational property.
Execution fails when structure strips people of their ability to respond. When everything requires escalation. When systems are designed to audit performance rather than enable it. When policies exist to avoid embarrassment rather than increase effectiveness.
Planning must serve manoeuvrability
The point of planning is not certainty. It's manoeuvrability.
You don't plan to predict. You plan to act. And that means your planning process should surface risk, expose assumptions, and create the conditions for movement. That's what we really mean by "protecting the ability to act": designing planning activities and a structure that increases the number of meaningful options available to those closest to the problem.
This is where so many organisations go wrong. They conflate control with readiness. They see tight coordination as a substitute for clarity. They assume that because they've defined the target and issued a PowerPoint, the system is now aligned.
But tightly wound systems do not respond well to shocks. They're brittle. They stall when things change. You get a lot of noise and very little progress.
The organisations that execute strategy well are the ones that stay loose, not locked. Where people are trusted to make decisions without cascading upwards. Where the gap between orientation and action is as small as possible.
Coherence, not control
Let's be clear. We're not talking about chaos. Agency does not mean everyone is doing their own thing. What we're after is coherence, a system where parts are free to act locally but still contribute to the whole.
That is the real job of leadership. Not to command every action, but to shape the environment in which good action becomes possible. To design and maintain a viable structure. To cultivate shared purpose and strategic direction. To build the feedback loops that enable adaptation without centralised bottlenecks.
As I wrote in "The Decentralised Execution Manifesto", your job as a leader is to increase the number of viable options available at every level of the organisation. That means:
Removing artificial constraints that limit action
Ensuring that teams have the right information, relationships, and scope of control
Protecting time and attention from performative work
Creating a clear strategic direction, while accepting that action might not always look like alignment
Put simply, strategy should increase your capacity to make decisions, not reduce it.
Action is the only test that matters
A strategy that only works under perfect conditions is not a strategy. It's a fantasy.
In real life, strategy unfolds in conditions that are unpredictable, constrained, and constantly evolving. The work is messy, priorities collide, context changes, new actors emerge, and the people on the ground are left to make sense of it all, often with little support.
If your people do not have the room to manoeuvre, the structure to support them, or the permission to act, the strategy execution fails. That happens regardless of how brilliant it looked in the boardroom.
Execution is where strategy proves itself. And execution begins with protecting the organisation's ability to act.
Do not start with alignment. Start with agency.
It's not enough to create the perfect strategy; there's no such thing. You need to stop making it harder to execute the one you have.
A strategy that survives contact with reality is not the one with the best plan. It's the one that enables the most meaningful action, that protects the edges of the organisation from centralised dysfunction, that decentralises sensemaking, and that builds structural autonomy, not just rhetorical intent.
The next time you think about execution, don't start with alignment. Start with agency.
Ask what is getting in the way of action, then do something about it, and then your strategy will stand a chance of surviving contact with reality.
